WarCouncil’s “Zero to Clausewitz”

Thanks to Zenpundit.

A good cheat sheet for terms of strategy.

The 300 words are at this link: http://static.squarespace.com/static/52908c90e4b023ca755eb442/t/5471a4dce4b031c87aefa2a3/1416733916438/300Word_StrategicEducation_WarCouncil.pdf

This is testable. :-)

WarCouncil’s “Zero to Clausewitz”

http://zenpundit.com/?p=41829

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

The fine gents at WarCouncil.org have released the Cliff Notes of Strategy in their “WarCouncil.org 300 Word Strategic Education” . It is excellent:

 Zero to Clausewitz in 60 Minutes: Your Complete 300 Word Strategic Education 

Can we educate a strategist in an hour?  Some would argue this task is impossible, that it takes a lifetime, or at least 10,000 hours. 

But what if we had to?  Imagine it were possible – how would you do it?  How would youaccelerate learning to strategic competency?  Note: I define competency as someone that would know, understand, and be able to apply a core set of strategic concepts to analyze and appraise modern war (see also “strategic understanding”).

One scientifically validated path would be the Pareto Principle, which holds, across many systems, that 80% of output comes from 20% of input.  How does this help us rapidly educate strategic practitioners?  We would first identify the critical 20% knowledge base that produces these outsize gains.  We would then leverage this 20% (or “minimum effective dose”) by proving a simple framework for use in any war.

(Continued at Zenpundit's blog at the link below)

http://zenpundit.com/?p=41829

I fully concur that we need to be able to develop and execute strategy during austerity and for a long time to come.  But the debate about looking forward or backward reminds me of Cohen and Gooch's book Military Misfortune in which posit that military failures are a result of three "failures" failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate.  I think we have to look back and forward as we develop and execute strategy in the age of austerity (and in any age for that matter).  I do concur that we need to use caution in not over-inflating threats or chase after threats merely to justify force structure and military spending.  I think the old tactical construct of identifying the most likely and most dangerous threats can be useful but I think what might to often happen is that we focus on the most dangerous threat without consideration of the likelihood of the threat occurring.  But good strategy will focus somewhere in between and provide the agility to address emerging threats that may or may not have been identified.

I am also reluctant to toss the futurists out in favor of history.  When we look at the Global Trends reports some of us criticize them because past forecasts did not occur the way they were described or did not happen in the time frames suggested.  I think a good historical study would be to look at the past Global Trends forecasts and conduct an analysis of what conditions arose or events occurred that prevented the negative forecasts from coming to fruition.  I would hope that some things did not occur because strategies and actions were developed and executed that altered the course of the forecasts.  To me this is the value of the Global Trends, if the report can identify future possibilities that we either want to happen or want to prevent from happening, policy makers and strategists can do something about them.  A future forecast may not need to simply translate to the idea that we need to spend more on high end military expenditures or increase or maintain current force structure but could identify how our scare resources might be more effectively allocated to support our national interests and achieve our desired ends.  And perhaps most importantly identify how other instruments of national power, other than military, might be employed to achieved desired ends.

V/R
Dave

To avoid failure, you must recognize success

http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20131101-to-avoid-failure-you-must-recognize-success.ece

DAVID LONGSTREATH/AP

A destroyed Iraqi tank rests near a series of oil well fires during the Gulf War, March 9, 1991, in northern Kuwait. In the 1990s, observers increasingly came to believe that while the U.S. had won the Gulf War, it had lost the peace. But the U.S. was not losing the peace. In fact, it had already won it.

Published: 01 November 2013 04:09 PM

Updated: 01 November 2013 04:09 PM

 By Joshua Rovner 

The Department of Defense is in for some serious belt-tightening.

It already lost $37 billion as a result of sequestration, and much deeper cuts are coming. The Budget Control Act of 2011, along with the end of war-related spending, may end up costing the Pentagon about a third of its budget. It will surely affect the thousands of Texans associated with the defense industry in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Defense officials hope for a political compromise that would help them avoid this fate, but the outlook is not promising, and both parties have shown that defense spending is no longer sacrosanct. Moreover, few lawmakers will take the political risk of cutting military pay and benefits, which account for most of the rise in defense spending, so shrinking budgets will mostly affect decisions about what to buy and how to use it.

For policymakers and military planners, strategy under budget austerity is the new normal.

How can leaders make strategic decisions under these conditions? Last week’s Tower Center Conference on National Security at Southern Methodist University put the question to a range of military officers and national security scholars.

One answer reflected traditional thinking about threat assessment. When faced with uncertainty, the best solution is to survey the world for new threats and focus on meeting them. This is a common-sense approach to dealing with a range of uncertain challenges. Done well, it can alert officials to new issues for which they are insufficiently prepared. But it can be taken too far: The constant search for new threats may cause officials to exaggerate the real danger to national security, turning small problems into large ones and making it difficult to set priorities.

To avoid these pitfalls, a different approach would look not to the uncertain future but to the known past. Instead of warily scanning for new threats, it would focus on evaluating the results of recent U.S. strategy. This would include a frank discussion of mistakes and missed opportunities, but also a recognition of U.S. victories. The ability to see success is not just a feel-good excuse for patriotic backslapping. If we are interested in making prudent decisions about future strategy and defense spending, it is essential to see what worked and why.

Unfortunately, the U.S. is not always able to see victory, even when evidence of success is clear and abundant. In the 1990s, for example, observers increasingly came to believe that while the U.S. had won the first Gulf War, it had lost the peace. They worried that Saddam Hussein would remain a threat as long as he was in power and that he would eventually crack the international coalition arrayed against him. This view was widely held in Washington, and by the end of the decade, regime change became stated U.S. policy.

But the U.S. was not losing the peace. In fact, it had already won it. It had demolished Iraq’s conventional forces in the war, and it was doing so much damage to Iraq’s economy that it would take decades to rebuild. U.S. forces and international inspectors eliminated Iraq’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and forced Saddam to mothball his nuclear program.

Most of all, they altered Saddam’s basic worldview. Before the war, he sought to be a regional hegemon and rejected any international criticism as an insult to Iraqi honor. After the war, he focused his attention inward, doing whatever he could to keep his domestic enemies at bay, while simultaneously allowing international weapons inspectors to run around the country. Saddam was still in charge, but Iraq was no longer a meaningful threat to the United States or anyone else.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20131101-to-avoid-failure-you-must-recognize-success.ece 

Excerpt:

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

It appears that the Administration is shifting the dominant position on American Exceptionalism from the "crusader" to the "exemplar" (per Thomas Jefferson)or more specifically the shift is from a Jacksonian foreign policy model to a Wilsonian/Jeffersonian alignment.

But I think this may be illustrative of the way the Administration is operating this term and may indicate that the President feels he was burned by past collaborative efforts involving DoD, DoS, and CIA. 

It was a tight group that included no one outside the White House, a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review in 2009, which involved dozens of officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Rice said she briefed Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over weekly lunches.

I suspect that this will be the foreign policy and strategy model for the remainder of this term and we should consider what that means for the US and the future.

V/R
Dave

October 26, 2013

Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast

By MARK LANDLER

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/middleeast/rice-offers-a-more-modest-strategy-for-mideast.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON — Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region.

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.

That includes Egypt, which was once a central pillar of American foreign policy. Mr. Obama, who hailed the crowds on the streets of Cairo in 2011 and pledged to heed the cries for change across the region, made clear that there were limits to what the United States would do to nurture democracy, whether there, or in Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia or Yemen.

The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him.

“We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,” she said, adding, “He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/middleeast/rice-offers-a-more-modest-strategy-for-mideast.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

60 yr-old Seoul-Washington alliance needs renewed balance: experts

I think one of the first steps will need to be to reconfirm the 2009 ROK-US Joint Vision.

V/R

Dave

2012/12/31 16:46 KST

(News Focus) 60 yr-old Seoul-Washington alliance needs renewed balance: experts

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2012/12/31/55/0301000000AEN20121231003500315F.HTML

SEOUL, Dec. 31 (Yonhap) -- After 60 years of forging staunch bilateral relations, South Korea and the United States are now faced with the task of upgrading their ties to the direction of "rebalancing" in both bilateral and multilateral terms in accordance with sweeping changes in circumstances surrounding them, experts said Monday.

   Formed under a mutual defense treaty signed in 1953 and taken into effect the following year, the Seoul-Washington alliance has been developed into a "comprehensive and strategic relationship," with U.S. President Barack Obama recently calling its ties with Seoul "a linchpin of peace and security in the Asia Pacific."

   "The alliance was established in blood and cemented through mutual sacrifice over the past 60 years to become one of the longest and strongest ties in world history. And there would be little doubt that the solid military-based relationship helped Seoul achieve political and economic developments," said a senior foreign ministry official, requesting anonymity. 

"Circumstances surrounding the two countries, however, have gone through a sea of changes. In particular, the loosening of the Cold War alignments finally led to changes in South Koreans' perception of North Korea and the U.S., among other things. That urges both Seoul and Washington to redefine their ties," he added.

   With the emergence of younger generations in Korean society, who do not have first-hand experience of the 1950-53 Korean War and see the rise of non-conservative establishments in domestic politics, calls have grown from the public for the redefinition of the high-handed diplomacy with the U.S.

   "The South Korean people increasingly value ties with the U.S. on an equal footing if a series of incidents, particularly under the former President Roh Moo-hyun administration, serve any guide when the anti-American sentiment put the alliance to a serious test," said Yun Deok-min, a senior analyst at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. "How to resolve such tasks, while maintaining superb ties, will be key to future relations."

(Continued at the link below)

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2012/12/31/55/0301000000AEN20121231003500315F.HTML

North Korea's dangerous ambition

I have to respectfully disagree with the Honorable Ms. Harman and Mr Person.  Excerpt:

As convoluted as this may seem, North Korea's missile launch last week might just be a signal toPresident Obama — who will have more flexibility in his second term — to restart diplomacy. After all, when Obama was first campaigning for the presidency, engaging enemies was a central element of his foreign policy platform. 

If this missile test was a cry for attention, then attention must be paid. Rallying the region, which has equal or greater cause for concern, is important, but bilateral diplomacy could achieve a breakthrough. The six-party framework has not been successful for one important reason: North Korea has historical grievances with each of the other five members. From the North Korean perspective, therefore, it is akin to five schoolyard bullies meeting with a former victim to persuade him to give up his one deterrent.

While it is better to jaw jaw than war war as Churchill says, we should be under no illusion that it is the north that has brought on all of these historical grievances.  Sure we five can be considered the school yard bullies but the north has been very effective at dividing (but not quite conquering) in order to achieve its political goals.  I know it seems silly to say that "he started it" in 1945 48 and 50 and in more than 200 assaults on the Republic of Korea since then but the fact is that there have been numerous offers of reconciliation over the years just as an example starting with the 1992 "Agreement on reconciliation, non agression and exchanges and cooperation between South and North" (entire agreement is pasted below).  If we return to the diplomatic path (which I do think we should, but with realistic expectations that we can at best manage the situation and not necessarily change it because of the recalcitrance of the Kim Family Regime) then the point of departure should be an offer to the north to resume with the 1992 Agreement and move from there.  My bet would be that the north would not agree to go there again.

These cries for attention supposedly made to the US are not cries for diplomacy to resolve tensions or to allow the north to become a responsible member of the international community.  These cries for attention are deliberate actions to manipulate the situation as part of the regime's very real strategy of blackmail diplomacy to use provocations to gain political and economic concessions and also to use provocations (but blaming them on the ROK or US) as excuses to break agreements.  The bottom-line is that we do need to deal with north Korea but we have to deal with it as it really is and not as we would wish it to be (to borrow from the Perry policy review of 1999).  If we are unwilling to help the north Korean people change their regime then the best we can hope for is to manage the situation (deterring attack and preparing for collapse) until the Kim Family Regime goes away (which is of course what stands in the way of resolving the "Korea Question (para 60 of the Armistice) and implementing the 2009 ROK-US Joint Vision Statement of peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula).

One last point as another reminder on a peace agreement and US responsibilities  for establishing one which I will cut and paste from a previous message:

We should recall that the north attacked the South on June 25, 1950.  The UN Security Council voted on resolutions to come to the aid of the Republic of Korea to defend it and established the UN Command with US leadership (making the US the executive agent for the UN Command).  We should also recall that the signatories to the 1953 Armistice were north Korea (acting for the nKPA and the Chinese People's Volunteers) and the United Nations (represented by LTG Harrison).  

NAM IL	WILLIAM K. HARRISON, JR.
___________________________________ General, Korea People's Army Senior Delegate, Delegation of the Korean People's Army and the Chinese People's Volunteers	___________________________________    Lieutenant General, United States Army    Senior Delegate,    United Nations Command Delegation

If there is to be a peace agreement we might want to begin with the recommendations of paragraph 60 in the Armistice.  The countries concerned on both sides have to start with two sides that have fought this civil war – the Republic of Korea and the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea.  A US –DPRK peace agreement does not solve the "Korea question."

Recommendations to the Governments Concerned on Both Sides
60. In order to insure the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, the military Commanders of both sides hereby recommend to the governments of the countries concerned on both sides that, within three (3) months after the Armistice Agreement is signed and becomes effective, a political conference of a higher level of both sides be held by representatives appointed respectively to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc.

V/R

Dave

North Korea's dangerous ambition

A nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking the West Coast of the United States may be available to it in the near future.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-harman-north-korea-20121218,0,6025892.story

By Jane Harman and James Person

December 18, 2012

North Korea's first successful rocket launch is a truly dangerous development. Although the North Koreans have previously detonated two nuclear devices, until now they have not demonstrated any ability to deliver them. Weaponizing a missile is hard, but Pyongyang's close ally Iran has made great advances in miniaturizing warheads. With the combination of North Korea's nuclear bombs and Iran's technology, a nuclear-tipped missile could be capable of striking the West Coast of the United States in the near future. We can no longer afford to ignore North Korea.

It is important to ask why North Korea launched the rocket now. A look at three target audiences provides clues: the North Korean people, the South Korean people and the U.S. government.

The North Korean leadership had been promising its citizens for years that the country would become "strong and prosperous" by 2012, the 100th anniversary of founding leader Kim Il Sung's birth. This was more crucial after the very public failed missile test in April became a source of national shame. Last week's successful launch produced euphoria and intense pride and fortified the authority of Kim Jong Un one year into his reign.

The second audience is the South Korean people. From across the heavily fortified demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, the North's missile test was a ham-handed effort to interfere in the South's presidential election Wednesday. But this attempted meddling will most likely backfire. Although the two candidates have expressed their commitment to improving inter-Korean relations, North Korea has criticized Park Geun-hye, candidate of the ruling conservative New Frontier Party and daughter of former President Park Chung-hee. Pyongyang seems to be sending the message that inter-Korean relations will remain as tumultuous as they have been over the last five years if another conservative candidate is elected.

The third audience is Washington. For more than 40 years, Pyongyang has been using military adventurism to try to get our attention. This began with the seizure of the Pueblo, a U.S. naval intelligence ship, in international waters in 1968. The U.S. response was to negotiate to recover the 81 surviving crew members and, in the process, sign an apology for committing espionage. The lesson the North took from that episode was that provocative action gets attention — a message reinforced when the U.S. ignored North Korea's repeated efforts in the 1970s to replace the Korean Wararmistice with a permanent peace treaty.

As convoluted as this may seem, North Korea's missile launch last week might just be a signal toPresident Obama — who will have more flexibility in his second term — to restart diplomacy. After all, when Obama was first campaigning for the presidency, engaging enemies was a central element of his foreign policy platform.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-harman-north-korea-20121218,0,6025892.story

Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy

An interesting critique and new term (I like this guy – you can't solve a problem until you can name it – remember that we have spent the last 11 years trying to name the wars that we have been fighting at the expense of trying to understand them)  :

You can’t solve a problem until you can name it. We have names for one axis of our politics — right vs. left, big versus small  government. But voters and politicians have no name for what should be an equally important set of questions that cuts straight through those ideological divisions, which is complexity versus simplicity. The name, for a lack of a better alternative, is  Kludgeocracy. 

The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but  temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming,  where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough  kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.

But read the whole paper at the link below.

V/R

Dave 

Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy 

 http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Teles_Steven_Kludgeocracy_NAF_Dec2012.pdf

Steven M. Teles, Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University 

December 2012

The last thirty years of American history have witnessed, at least rhetorically, a battle over the size of government.

Yet that is not what the history books will say the next thirty years of American politics were about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will dominate American politics going forward will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer size.

The next decade of American politics will see greater attention placed on the substantial amount of government action that redistributes resources upward to the wealthy and the organized, to the disadvantage of the poorer and less organized. Connected to this, greater attention will be placed on the rickety, complicated and self-defeating complexity of public policy across multiple, seemingly unrelated areas of government activity.

Conservatives over the last few years have increasingly claimed that America is, in Hayek’s terms, on the road to serfdom. This is ridiculous, for it ascribes vastly greater coherence to American government than we have ever achieved. If anything, we have arrived at a form of government with no ideological justification whatsoever.

You can’t solve a problem until you can name it. We have names for one axis of our politics — right vs. left, big versus small government. But voters and politicians have no name for what should be an equally important set of questions that cuts straight through those ideological divisions, which is complexity versus simplicity. The name, for a lack of a better alternative, is Kludgeocracy.

The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows. 

Download the entire paper at this link:

 http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Teles_Steven_Kludgeocracy_NAF_Dec2012.pdf